MY SON CALLED from Seattle a couple of weeks ago to tell me about this new worship album, Deluge, led by Jonathan Stockstill out of Baton Rouge.  He emphasized that I must ‘not pass GO, collect $200 or do one more thing’ (my paraphrase) until I download it off iTunes TODAY - you get the whole thing for $9.99.  Then my other son texted me, asking if I’d heard the album yet.  OK.  This must be good.  So I filed it in my mind and made a note - a sticky note - to do just that -(speaking of sticky notes - those little darlings that I love so much - well some blonde chick left a pack of hot pink ones in her jacket pocket, threw the jacket in the wash with all the nice white delicate items, (some brand spankin’ new) and when I opened the washer last night, pink dye blots were all over everything - I gasped and threw in a couple scoops of Oxy-Clean, a double dose of Tide and put it on a long warm wash with a soaking cycle and went to bed.  Got up this morning, held my breath as I opened the washer and praise be to God - all was as it should be.  Praise God for little blessings!) OK, so of course I got busy and the next day, the son who had phoned me, now texted me to say, “Did you get Deluge?!”  Okay, the pressure is on, this must be worth gettin’ - I jumped on iTunes and TechnoDenise tried to buy it with her 2-year old iTunes card that she could never get worked out - I know, it’s crazy, but I struggle with such things - I’m trying to allow my youngest to train himself to be my computer Geek around the house so he can handle all these details - so Seth came over to the computer, walked me through it and I have to tell you…this album is worth it’s weight in the current gold market and more.  Any album that beckons me into God’s presence and helps me linger there, wanting to press repeat over and over -  it’s like therapy as I plug in my earphones and sit outside watching the birds, walking, whatever.  Check it out at www.myspace.com/delugeworship there’s a few samples you can listen to.  What’s more fun than to WORSHIP, WORSHIP, WORSHIP HIM!!?!?!?!  (I wanna share another album with you soon - I’m not easy to please in this department, let me warn you - but my firstborn directed me to it and my walks around the park will never be the same!)

Believing is one thing.  Living what you believe is an entirely different matter altogether.  For years I’ve believed in eating to enhance and sustain our healthy, strong bodies. I’ve studied nutrition as a hobby/passion/conviction and I’ve implemented lots and lots of good, healthful habits in our home, with our children.  But over time, my sharp edge of nutritional conviction has been dulled by the busy-ness of life and the frivolous preference of our taste buds.  Some new and not-so-beneficial habits have made their way into our daily menus, little-by-little, until it’s bugged me enough to want to make some radical and consistent adjustments.  (key words.)  Subtle changes made sporadically, really don’t have any long-term, positive effect on our health.  So, here are a few of the ‘kitchen decisions’ I’ve made:

1-white flour is not our friend.  From tortillas to toast, pasta to pizza dough, I’m determined to purchase exclusively, whole wheat, whole grain and sprouted grain breads.  (I’m open to deviation at holidays) Kids aren’t allowed to complain.

2-oatmeal is our friend.  1/2 cup a day will lower your cholesterol by 2% and keep diabetes away.  Topped with fresh berries/bananas/raisins, cinnamon and a little rice milk makes for a perfect breakfast.

3-frozen fruit smoothies loaded with berries, bananas, rice milk, almonds, a little flaxseed oil, yogurt or keffir (without added sugar or sweetened juice) will be an almost-daily snack around our house.

4-fresh vegies love us and we love them!  I’m buying all sorts of new kinds and daring breeds; lightly steaming, then putting them into everything and using fresh vegies instead of potato chips at lunch and for snacks.  Salads are like an artist’s blank canvas - so much room to roam and create!  Wow am I having a blast with all the varieties of greens and complimentary veggies available to purchase in our great nation.  I’ll share some combination ideas with you soon.

5. if I stir-fry, I’m trying to use PAM spray and some chicken broth instead of loads of oil and butter.

6. beans are nearly a miracle food.  1/2 cup a day will lower cholesterol by 8% and add a super-fiber food to your body that’s begging for real fiber.  My goal is to daily get these into our diet.  I’m adding them to salads, pasta dishes, soups, stir-frys, egg dishes and anything else that fits.  The broad variety and delicious flavor makes this quite an easy change to make.

7. we love our meat, but I’m aiming to make this a smaller slice of the total ‘pie’ of what we’re consuming.  Majoring on veggies, minor-ing on meat and adding lots of fish.

8. processed foods are getting scarce on our table.  Macaroni and cheese, potato chips, lunch meat, frozen burritos and breakfast cereal will make the occasional appearance, but for the most part…bye bye.

We are loving this simple and delicious way of eating and I’ll keep you posted and share some more ideas/recipes/results along the way…

I went to a ladies’ meeting recently, and the featured speaker was a gifted gal who helps folks organize, based on their temperament.  That line piqued my interest and I made a point to be there.

 This is my daily battle.  A messy table.  And countertops.  And any other available horizontal surface!  At times we’ve had to eat on ‘t.v.’ trays because all my books, papers, files, reminders, sticky notes, coupons, curriculum, teacher guides, recipes, napkins scrawled with spontaneous thoughts, yada, yada, yada is strewn about both the kitchen and dining room tables.  This is how I produce massive amounts of work - spread out everywhere.  I tend to operate like this everywhere I go.  The last church I shared at, laughed and joked about my ‘Target bag full of stuff’ that I carried everywhere I went (along with my briefcase and purse!).  Some of you can’t relate to this way of operating because you are neat nicks.  I used to wish I could be just like you when I grew up - but now that I’m enlightened, I just praise God for diversity!  The professional organizer set me free as she explained that no, I wasn’t a disorganized slob…I was simply the temperament type who happened to need some private ‘crazy space’ to spread out.  That’s how I organize - if I stuff it in a drawer or file box - chances are I’ll forget it!

Imagine my glee at finding this amazing 3-tiered rolling solid metal shelving at Costco for about $39.00.  (Gregory spied it out–talk about an orderly guy.) As you can see below, I load it up from top to bottom - sort of a high-rise of useful stuff - and then I roll it out of sight into a cubby closet, shut the door and voila! Surfaces clean and ready for living life.  Perhaps this idea, or at least its concept, will help you to function more effectively at your house.

and I’ve missed hangin’ out here on the blog!  Before I knew it, several days had flown by while I’d been re-sharpening my nutrition skills and reminding myself of what I already knew, but sort of forgot, or got lazy or busy or just shifted into auto-pilot.  You know how life just takes over sometimes…but it’s time to change our ways, shift gears and adjust things in the kitchen.  So I’ve been planning meals and menus, shopping for the right ingredients and generally ‘upping our nutrition game’ here on the home front.  I’ll be sharing more with you along the way, and handing you some helpful tools that I trust will encourage you, too, as you endeavor to build healthy lives at home…

Okay, on Easter Sunday, I promised to share a fun story with you about ‘defying the natural prognosis’ of life’s circumstances.  I’m sort of a squeeky-wheel-never-say-die-call-and-talk-to-the-manager gal - as in ‘rules were made to be broken’; not as in ’sinning to get my way’, compromising the Truth to gain or taking old stuff back to trick the establishment.  No, no, no.  But I am a firm believer in genuinely appealing when you feel that, in actual fact, while holding tightly to your integrity, you have a case.  Perhaps that’s why I’ve raised 5 ‘lawyers’.  (But then, as I see it, most all kids are lawyers….or at least, anarchists!)

Back to my story.  We relocated in late summer of 07.  Along with a few minor cosmetic changes to the older home we had purchased, we bought a few new items,  and one in particular promised in big fat letters, a $200.00 rebate upon professional installation.  Well, we scrambled to hire the installer within the time frame allotted, kept the receipts, documents, etc. and prepared to fill out all the paperwork and claim our ‘prize’!

OOOps.  Fine print. 

  Yuck.  I remember now how much I hate fine print.  It can really dull the luster of the promise.  Point 2 in particular.  “You must cut out and include the original label from the carton, which includes the UPC code, model number and serial number; or YOUR CLAIM CANNOT BE PROCESSED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!   YOUR CLAIM CANNOT BE PROCESSED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!…………..YOUR CLAIM CANNOT BE PROCESSED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We threw away the box the night of our purchase.  Complete with the UPC code.  Drats. Daddy doesn’t make it a habit to keep clutter around. He’s pretty obsessed about unhelpful stuff being disposed of as quickly as is humanly possible.  (pray for me, I am the creative type and we like our stuff!)

I cry foul!  Not only did we hire a professional installer, we tipped him $50.00 over his fee of $150.00 since we were planning to get the rebate anyway and why not bless the guy?!?!?!  My mind was racing.  I guess it’s too late to UN-bless the guy, huh?  I wouldn’t really do that, I’m just flipping out for the the moment.

I stewed.  I pondered.  I plotted.  Hmm.  I filed the paperwork and decided not to do anything at the moment…….from time to time I’d pull out the stack again, consider a scheme that was brewing in my head and then, promptly, re-file the paperwork. 

1 day before the deadline to have the entry mailed in.  THE MOMENT OF TRUTH.  OK, what do I have to lose?  I filled out everything  in detail.  I included the installer receipt, the business card of the guy who sold us the item, the receipt and, my Ace - I took a digital photo of the installed item in my house, downloaded and printed it off and wrote a note of appeal to the ‘authorities’.  I begged that they reconsider Point 2 based on the fact that we are people of integrity, who indeed have purchased the item, had it installed(see photo!), tipped the guy generously and actually were strongly encouraged to buy the particular item due to the promised rebate.

THE $200.00 CHECK ARRIVED HERE ON GOOD FRIDAY.  Pretty cool, huh? As in the words of Sir Winston Churchill, “Never, never, never, never, give in.”

I’m in love; completely addicted to the home schooling lifestyle.  This is a ’snapshot’ of a day-in-the-life at the Mira house. Here’s our Seth Daniel, sipping on his all-fruit smoothie, (that I - Mom -  had the privilege of making him) in the middle of the morning.  His feet are snuggled in his donkey slippers, he’s comfy in his long johns, as he reads through his daily math exercise. 

What could be better than having my children so near me, almost every day, in their growing-up years?  It’s been worth the pressure of living on one income, complete with lousy (cheap!) vacations, pinching pennies at the clothing store, the grocery store and the toy store.  It’s been worth all those do-it-at-home hair hi-lite kits (ugh), pedicures and make-it-from-scratch meals.  I’d drive ‘beaters’ all over again, just to be the one with the ‘loudest’ voice in my sons’ lives, next to Daddy. 

I hear, too often to count, that it’s just not possible for folks to live on one income anymore.  Hmm.  I guess it could depend on how one ’slices the economic pie’.  For lots of American families, getting Mom back home is a few (difficult) decisions away.  How thankful I am that we somehow, in God’s great mercy, found the grace to make such decisions, in order to find such wealth…right here in our own backyard.

Apart from His grace and leading, I would never have known such pleasures!

Give in, give up, stop believing, step backwards.

When: 

• Monday shows up.
• The battle rages. 
• Children perpetually push the limits.
• You’re exhausted.
• You don’t ‘feel’ like fighting.
• The world is not “as it should be”.
• “The sun’s not shining down on me”.
• You hit one more bump.
• You wrestle one more crocodile.
• Stand Your Ground and Wait For God.
• (Eph. 6:13…after you have done everything, to stand.)

He never fails.

He always shows up.

You will win if you decide that victory is your only option.

Galatians 6:9  Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest IF WE DO NOT GIVE UP.

  J. Michael Smith, President of the Home School Legal Defense Association (www.hslda.org), interviewed me recently on the topic of ‘Raising Extraordinary Boys’, and it’s airing this week (Mon-Fri, March 10-14) on Home School Heartbeat, a daily radio program aired on over 600 affiliates nationwide and produced by HSLDA.

Click on www.homeschoolheartbeat.com (or cut and paste to your browser) and you will find station listings and an opportunity to hear the interview online.

Today is Saturday in the U.S.A. and you’ll find many, many, many Moms and Dads frantically carting kids from soccer, to baseball to birthday party #1 for him and birthday party #2 for her, to the obligatory school fund raiser, through the drive-thru for some quick deep fried something with syrup over ice to wash it down, back to the house to pick up what you forgot and off again….THE RACE IS ON for lots of us.

I LOVE WEEKENDS WITH LEISURELY AWAKENINGS AND

THE FREEDOM TO BE SPONTANEOUS

don’t you?

Doesn’t that sound glorious?  Just imagine…coffee pot on…kids sleeping in…a BIG BLANK TO FILL IN any way you (and hubby) choose.  Sitting at the window, sipping, eating your sprouted whole grain toast with raw almond butter and honey with a sweet and delicious winter grapefruit while you ponder the hummingbird/robin/swallow/eagle/sparrow (depending on your region and the season) flittering about outside…kids wake and pick on the guitar, then pull out the Legos…run around in jammies til noon….pure and simple BLISS.

I don’t live in a fantasy, and every Saturday can’t always be unplanned and wide open, but lots of them certainly can, at least for LARGE PORTIONS of the day if we make strategic choices…

Perhaps it’s time to make some adjustments to all the commitments/obligations/pressures we’ve gotten ourselves into……

Still getting ‘back in the saddle’ here at home and I found some especially unidentifiable, ugly-looking stains spread across the fabric of my white board shorts.  Bummer.  They’d already been laundered twice and the stains simply refused to budge.  Well, this is when I pull out my special stain recipe, developed over 2 decades while living with 6 very active, athletic and manly men!

Here goes:

• 1 large plastic bowl
• 1 smaller heavy glass plate/bowl
• 1/2 cup of serious laundry detergent of your choice - I like Tide
• 1/4 cup of Oxi-Clean the stain specialist
• 

Boil a kettle of water - careful handling it, as little ones could be nearby.  Place the item with the mean stain in the bottom of the large plastic bowl (you can see my bowl is blue here in the photo).  Add your two cleaning agents.  Pour the boiled water over all and give it a good stir to blend well.  Place the heavy plate/bowl on top to keep the stained item fully submerged beneath the stain-removing brew (you can see the shorts peeking out next to the black plate above).  Let it sit for 24 - 48 hours.  Toss the soaking water and clothing piece in your next load of same-colored laundry.  Launder as always.

This will usually lift the vicious stain and put a smile on your face, but if not, I’ve got some other great tips to conquer those bad boys.

My grown sons still call me to get stain-removal tips from time to time.  Isn’t it fun to be a mom?!

I’d love to hear your favorite stain tips if you get a minute to share them with us.  POST THEM HERE, now that my tech guy has enabled my site to receive comments, you are free to POST TO YOUR HEART’S CONTENT!

Back to work…